History at Vanderbilt

History has been an integral part of the undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Vanderbilt since the University was founded, in 1873. The first undergraduate students of the discipline immersed themselves in subjects as various as the Roman Empire, English constitutional history, the history of religion (including Islam), political economy, and contemporary American politics. Graduate study came early—in the 1880s—to Vanderbilt. Taught in weekly seminars, a new instructional form, students were expected to master the standard texts—in ancient history and in legal history, for example—while the more advanced among them engaged in innovative research on such issues as the Civil War, local government in the South and Southwest, and the tariff, Henry George and socialism. Vanderbilt’s first PhD in history was awarded in 1899, one of only three awarded in the South before 1900.

Today, the Department of History’s 40 full-time faculty members offer courses that span the globe—from Africa and Asia to Europe, Latin America and the United States—and that introduce students to a range of historical questions and methodologies. The undergraduate program attracts over 200 majors, and the graduate program annually enrolls about 10 students in a variety of fields. Department faculty are at once devoted and skilled teachers on the one hand and innovative and accomplished researchers and writers of history on the other.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Jane Landers gave the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, “A View from the Other Side: The Saint Domingue Revolution through Spanish Sources,” March 3-5, 2015 at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. To see the titles of Jane’s lectures link here.

Julia Cohen has received a National Jewish Book Award for her monograph, Becoming Ottomans, in the category of ‘Writing Based on Archival Material,’ and another, in the category of ‘Sephardic Culture,’ for her co-edited volume Sephardi Lives. Please see more here.

Peter Lorge, co-editor, Chinese and Indian Warfare – From the Classical Age to 1870 (Routledge, 2015). Also, Lorge established a new book series with Routledge, Asian States and Empires, in 2007. The tenth in this series has just been published, Warfare in Pre-British India, 1500 BCE to 1740 CE by Kaushik Roy (Routledge, 2015).

Edward Wright-Rios, Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014)

Celso Thomas Castiho's "Performing Abolitionism, Enacting Citizenship: The Social Construction of Political Rights in 1880s Recife, Brazil," was selected as the 2014 winner of the Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize, awarded annually by the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association.

Lauren R. Clay's book, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies, (Cornell University Press, 2013), was awarded Honorable Mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research for the best book in theatre history or cognate disciplines published in 2014, and, was selected as a finalist for the 2014 George Freedley Award, given by the Theatre Library Association.

Joel Harrington was presented the Chancellor's Awards for Research. Harrington, Centennial Professor of History, was noted for his book The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. Executioner has been translated into ten languages and was named one of the Best Books of 2013 by The Telegraph and History Today.

Vanderbilt University faculty members Samira Sheikh, Tony Stewart, and David Wasserstein will be co-directing an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on the theme " When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam Beyond the Arab World" during the 2015/2016 academic year.